This invention relates generally to board games with concealed game pieces that combine the skills of strategy and memory, and specifically relates to the popular chess game.
In a conventional chess game, two players battle against each other on a sixty-four squares checkered board using sixteen chess pieces--one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights and eight pawns respectively. This game has been played for centuries by millions of people worldwide. The traditional chess game is one of strategy through predicting an opponent's future movements of the chess pieces in order to plan the attacking and defensive positions accordingly, to ultimately corner an opponent's king chess piece.
However, the chess game does not challenge the players' memory of the previous movements or the current location of an opponent's chess pieces because all the chess pieces are simply in plain view. Therefore, a player with superior strategy and experience will always prevail against one with less experience. In order to level the playing field, and allow the less experienced players to become more competitive, there is a need of a new game that the players may not be able to view their opponents' chess pieces. Consequently, the memorization of the previous movements and the location of an opponent player's chess piece will become crucial to win the game. In other words, a player with superior memory, though not as skillful in strategy as the other player, may still prevail in this game which combines the skills of memory and strategy.
In addition, the initial placement of the chess pieces in a traditional chess game is fixed which limits the potential number of possible layouts. More experienced chess players generally recognize some of the most popular or traditional gambits or chess piece layouts as employed by other master chess players. However, if the chess pieces are concealed, and if the initial placement of the chess pieces may be varied, the traditional layouts will not apply and a less experienced player who is not familiar with such traditional strategies will not suffer from such a disadvantage. In such a game, a player will not be able to see the location of the king game piece of an opposing player. Hence it will be crucial for a player to remember the movements of the opponent's game pieces in order to deduce and locate the king chess piece to win the game.
To further challenge the master chess players or train to improve one's chess skills, it will also be highly desirable to have a game where even one's own game pieces are not viewable by the player after the initial placement, thereby making the traditional chess game even more challenging. This will force the players to form a mental picture in addition to looking at the concealed game pieces on the chessboard.
Also it will be desirable to add barriers to the game such that certain squares on the playing surface will be occupied and causes blocking passage of other chess pieces to enhance the enjoyment of such game variation.
Thus, there is a need for a game that combines the skills of chess strategy and the memorization of an opponent's game pieces. Furthermore, there is a need for a game where the initial placements of the game pieces are not fixed thereby allowing the game to have numerous different variations and less predictability.